As the world awaits news about how last week”s Paris attacks were coordinated, an obvious scapegoat is encryption technology, which the perpetrators may have used to block surveillance of their efforts to organize and carry out their carnage.

It”s an understandable reaction.

In our anguish, we wish someone could have thwarted the assailants who killed more than 100 people and injured many more. They struck at the heart of civil society, violating the places where we gather for a concert or dinner on a Friday in November without fear.

Right now, we don”t know much about how the attacks were carried out. That hasn”t stopped intelligence officers, law enforcement officials and others from calling attention to technology”s potential role and the possibility that the attackers are “going dark,” hatching their attacks by communicating in unbreakable encoded messages.

Before the pendulum swings to give law enforcement more leeway to access our smartphones, iMessages and other kinds of personal information, everyone needs to take a breath.

Do we want to live in a world where we sacrifice our privacy and cybersecurity so that law enforcement has a long-shot chance to stop the next attack?

I know I don”t.

“The Paris attacks are absolutely tragic,” said Harley Geiger, advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. “But the response should not be to undermine cybersecurity for digital services on which people rely.”

The past few years have been an education about the breadth and sweep of the U.S. surveillance operation.

After disclosures of classified documents by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor, the pendulum swung in the direction of privacy protections. In June, President Barack Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which reformed the NSA surveillance program that was involved in vacuuming up telephone records.

Tim Cook, Apple”s CEO, has been outspoken about providing strong encryption in Apple products and services. Starting last year, iPhone users” passcodes encrypted photos, email, contacts and other information, and Apple stopped storing encryption keys. “No one should have to decide between privacy or security. We should be smart enough to do both,” Cook said recently.

But now, Paris.

Law enforcement officials haven”t hesitated making some hay of the moment.

CIA Director John Brennan said privacy advocates have undermined the ability of spies to monitor terrorists.

New York police Commissioner Bill Bratton said that society has “gone blind in regard to the commercialization and selling of these devices that cannot be accessed either by the manufacturer or, more importantly, by us in law enforcement.”

Some commentators speculated that maybe the attacks were coordinated using Sony”s PlayStation 4. There had been Islamic State chatter of a possible French attack in September, but efforts to monitor the discussion failed when plotters switched to encrypted PlayStation equipment, reported the Los Angeles Times, quoting an anonymous U.S. law enforcement official.

Others have used the moment to attack messaging services such as WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, as well as the kinds of encryption used by Google and Apple.

Think about it: What if we could gather and analyze everything that everyone was saying? Could we stop these attacks? Maybe. But with each attack, it seems, we wrestle anew with the big question: What kind of world do we want to live in?

“Nothing has really changed,” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University”s Center for Internet and Society. We have to decide again whether we “are going to have technology that can protect people from privacy violations, trade secret theft, intellectual privacy or human rights violations, or a sequence of backdoors for law enforcement but also for criminals as well.”

These are hard questions to answer in the wake of the terrible events in Paris. I don”t envy law enforcement. They have a critical job to do in difficult circumstances.

But our freedoms are vital too; they make us who we are. I don”t mind a vigorous debate about how to balance privacy and security. But let”s not give surveillance efforts carte blanche.

As the world awaits news about how last week”s Paris attacks were coordinated, an obvious scapegoat is encryption technology, which the perpetrators may have used to block surveillance of their efforts to organize and carry out their carnage.

It”s an understandable reaction.

In our anguish, we wish someone could have thwarted the assailants who killed more than 100 people and injured many more. They struck at the heart of civil society, violating the places where we gather for a concert or dinner on a Friday in November without fear.

Right now, we don”t know much about how the attacks were carried out. That hasn”t stopped intelligence officers, law enforcement officials and others from calling attention to technology”s potential role and the possibility that the attackers are “going dark,” hatching their attacks by communicating in unbreakable encoded messages.

Before the pendulum swings to give law enforcement more leeway to access our smartphones, iMessages and other kinds of personal information, everyone needs to take a breath.

Do we want to live in a world where we sacrifice our privacy and cybersecurity so that law enforcement has a long-shot chance to stop the next attack?

I know I don”t.

“The Paris attacks are absolutely tragic,” said Harley Geiger, advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. “But the response should not be to undermine cybersecurity for digital services on which people rely.”

The past few years have been an education about the breadth and sweep of the U.S. surveillance operation.

After disclosures of classified documents by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor, the pendulum swung in the direction of privacy protections. In June, President Barack Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which reformed the NSA surveillance program that was involved in vacuuming up telephone records.

Tim Cook, Apple”s CEO, has been outspoken about providing strong encryption in Apple products and services. Starting last year, iPhone users” passcodes encrypted photos, email, contacts and other information, and Apple stopped storing encryption keys. “No one should have to decide between privacy or security. We should be smart enough to do both,” Cook said recently.

But now, Paris.

Law enforcement officials haven”t hesitated making some hay of the moment.

CIA Director John Brennan said privacy advocates have undermined the ability of spies to monitor terrorists.

New York police Commissioner Bill Bratton said that society has “gone blind in regard to the commercialization and selling of these devices that cannot be accessed either by the manufacturer or, more importantly, by us in law enforcement.”

Some commentators speculated that maybe the attacks were coordinated using Sony”s PlayStation 4. There had been Islamic State chatter of a possible French attack in September, but efforts to monitor the discussion failed when plotters switched to encrypted PlayStation equipment, reported the Los Angeles Times, quoting an anonymous U.S. law enforcement official.

Others have used the moment to attack messaging services such as WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, as well as the kinds of encryption used by Google and Apple.

Think about it: What if we could gather and analyze everything that everyone was saying? Could we stop these attacks? Maybe. But with each attack, it seems, we wrestle anew with the big question: What kind of world do we want to live in?

“Nothing has really changed,” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University”s Center for Internet and Society. We have to decide again whether we “are going to have technology that can protect people from privacy violations, trade secret theft, intellectual privacy or human rights violations, or a sequence of backdoors for law enforcement but also for criminals as well.”

These are hard questions to answer in the wake of the terrible events in Paris. I don”t envy law enforcement. They have a critical job to do in difficult circumstances.

But our freedoms are vital too; they make us who we are. I don”t mind a vigorous debate about how to balance privacy and security. But let”s not give surveillance efforts carte blanche.